‘Pro Bono’ Episodes 3 & 4 Recap – You Can Have Too Much Of A Good Thing

I’d like to be wrong about this, but Pro Bono strikes me as the kind of weekend K-Drama that is perfectly fine and serviceable, but one that, for some hard-to-articulate reason, never really resonates with people. I got that impression immediately, and nothing that happens in Episodes 3 & 4 disabuses me of the notion. It’s pretty good, but at no point does it really threaten to become great.

Partially, this is because it embodies the worst, most indulgent K-Drama trend of absurd episode runtimes, most of them entirely unjustified. And while it’s too early to tell whether the season overall will feel too long – as, say, Typhoon Family did – I’m already beginning to suspect that it will. And that’s not a good sign on only the second week.

I know I’m particular about length, but it’s important! There’s nothing worse than a show being too long. And in a procedural like this, you can really feel it, because the case-of-the-week stories have to do all of the heavy lifting, which means any individual episode pairing is only paced as well as its one-off storyline. Pro Bono is trying to rectify this by revolving around memorably weird cases, but it’s a mixed bag in terms of overall effectiveness.

With the basic outline established in the first two outings, Episodes 3 and 4 find Da-wit firmly entrenched in the pro bono team. After his first client was a dog, his next needs to up the levels, so it turns out to be a kid who wants him to sue God for the fact he was born paralyzed from the waist down. This isn’t quite as silly as it sounds. The boy, Gang-hun, is really the avatar of an indifferent system, since sans a mailing address for “God”, the case becomes about seeking damages from the Woongsan Charitable Foundation, which sent Gang-hun’s mother, So-min, to Woongsan Hospital when she became pregnant only for the hospital to repeatedly deny her request for an abortion.

That’s quite serious! There’s all sorts bundled up here; the conditions of shelters for abandoned youth, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, healthcare, the moral component of being allowed to decide whether to carry a child with a disability or birth defect to term (the hospital didn’t provide an ultrasound that would have identified anything of this sort and given So-min some agency over her own destiny), and about disability, prejudice, and the right to life in general.

With all this you can sort of understand why the episodes run so long, but it all starts to feel a bit – forgive me – annoyingly preachy after a while. There are impassioned arguments about the sanctity of life, judges with visual impairments, hearing-impaired baker parents, and, of course, Da-wit learning a harsh lesson about his earlier dismissive conduct. These are all important, serious subjects, so I’m not complaining about their inclusion, but you can have too much of a good thing, I think, and it can be like being hit repeatedly over the head with a crowbar.

The solution is empathy, of course. The bit with the wheelchairs designed to create understanding about the difficulties of navigating life with a serious disability is played for laughs but making an important point, but then later, when the hospital’s abortion policy is justified on pro-life grounds, that’s a very important point made much more seriously, but with limited depth. Pro Bono has this curious way of never quite landing on the just-right way of tackling each big topic. It all feels slightly askew.

It might be a consequence of trying to include too much at once. The subjects expand to include bullying, depression, and suicide, and it’s just impossible to address all these things at the same time in a way that feels adequate. But there’s also a sense that Pro Bono doesn’t quite understand the message it’s settling on. Chairman Choi – the guy in charge of the hospital – eventually makes the grand altruistic gesture of adopting the adult So-min to legally become the grandfather of Gang-hun, his secret Go partner, which sounds nice written down. But it’s also a way to kind of endorse his pro-life argument and justify stripping bodily autonomy from vulnerable women. Wherever you come down on this ever-contentious debate, that’s your prerogative, but even after Episodes 3 and 4 both being devoted to it in their entirety, I’m not entirely sure where the show itself has settled. And that strikes me as a bit of an issue.